Poor Usability Is Undermining Disclosure

New CFI Report on the Fifty States’ Disclosure Websites With Detailed Tables Showing Results for Each of the States

One of the promises of campaign finance disclosure systems is that citizens will be able to use information to help guide their decisions. In recent years, there has been a lot of debate over gaps in the disclosure laws. But for disclosure to make a difference, the law is only the first link in a long implementation chain. In this project, the Campaign Finance Institute (CFI) looks at the other end: whatever the laws, do the various states make it possible for citizens to gain useful information from them?

The answer, CFI finds, is that most states fall far short of any reasonable standard. It takes too long for users to find the answers to simple questions, and the answers they give are as likely to be inaccurate as not. The participants in this study found the states’ websites frustrating and gave low grades to their assigned states. The report’s appendix details each of the fifty states’ scores on each of the questions. However, the news was not all gloomy for the states. A few consistently scored well. This means others can too. To wrap up, therefore, the report puts forward recommendations to help strengthen this crucial, but ignored, link in the chain.

The following is a reprint of the report’s full Executive Summary. It describes the project’s methodology, as well as its key findings.

Complete scores for individual states are available on the CFI website. The report includes links to each of the fifty states’ websites.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

One of the most important arguments made in favor of campaign finance disclosure is that the information can be useful to voters. But just because a candidate or political committee sends information to the government does not mean that the information gets out to voters effectively. Disclosure systems involve long chains of discrete steps that begin with legal requirements and end with the informational product’s end use and consequences. Most of the focus on disclosure in recent years understandably has been about the legal requirements. As important as these requirements may be, the promise cannot be achieved unless legal requirements are put into digestible formats by the agencies that implement the laws.

This report concentrates on the other end of the policy chain – on the ability of end users to gain basic information from the fifty states’ campaign finance websites. It looks at the experience not of the power user – the person able to download masses of data and analyze them – but on the non-specialist, the person most like the voters whom disclosure systems were intended to benefit. We recruited nearly 2,000 experienced Internet users through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to make 5,000 discrete, randomly assigned visits to the fifty states’ campaign finance websites. We found that even though many states have improved their online disclosure systems, the actual usability of the data has often been neglected. In almost a full third of those visits, our participants were not able to complete a set of basic data searches within 10 minutes. They fared only slightly better in terms of accuracy, completing an average of about 54% of their tasks correctly. However, there were important and wide-ranging disparities across states. A small number performed well, but a majority had either mixed results or performed poorly across the board.

These results should be of concern to state policymakers and reformers. In the final section of this paper, we offer eleven bullet points with practical suggestions for improving states’ websites. These recommendations are not meant to be exhaustive. More important is the spirit that guides them. One of the fundamental purposes of disclosure is to inform citizens. Before the internet, almost all of this had to be accomplished through intermediaries. The internet has made it possible for agencies to make useful information available directly. Our project has shown that most state agencies fall far short of best practices. However, a few states consistently did well. The fact that they did means that others can too. To do so, the states need to learn from each other. They also need to open themselves up to the perspectives of citizens who are not campaign finance or political professionals. Improvement will only come when their voices and needs get the attention they deserve.

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PRACTICAL AND OBJECTIVE RESEARCH FOR DEMOCRACY

The Campaign Finance Institute is the nation's pre-eminent think tank for objective, non-partisan research on money in politics in U.S. federal and state elections. CFI's original work is published in scholarly journals as well as in forms regularly used by the media and policy making community. Statements made in its reports do not necessarily reflect the views of CFI's Trustees or financial supporters.